The Surgery - Part One

I've sentenced myself to a nap every day this week.  I figured I need it since I'm still so exhausted from last week.  I'm not sure if it was the surgery or the anxiety that wiped me out so completely, but I'm withering.

I thought I'd tell you all the gory details.

I got to the hospital with my husband last Thursday morning at 6:30.  They gave me a designer gown with a slit right over my right bosom.  I think the only purpose for those slits in the front of the hospital gowns are to give the nurses nipple flashes of all the patients, and to provide you a place to stuff your heart monitor cords when you need to hobble to the bathroom.

(File photo.  Andrew won't take pictures of me in the hospital.  So this one's from January when I could have died.  Almost.  But not really.)

Anyway, I laid there in pre-op while a parade of lab techs, nurses, and CNAs did their thing to me.  

One guy came in to draw blood and hook up my IV.  He sprayed about a pint of my blood all over the sheets and then fumbled around trying to clean it up, apologizing and muttering about "covering his sins".  Poor guy.  It wasn't the only time that day that I had to wonder how the laundry staff gets all those blood stains out of the sheets.

Another nurse came in to ask me if I needed to be shaved.  How should I know, right?  How far in are they going to need to go?  So she sent someone in to "access the situation".  That was awesome.  Turns out I only needed a navel to knee iodine bath - I had tamed the beast to their satisfaction.

Then another nurse came in to ask me if I had any questions.  I did actually.  I knew that after my surgery I had to lay perfectly still for six hours - no head lifting, no leg bending, nothing.  (That's so that I wouldn't bleed to death out of the veins/arteries they were going to shove tubes up and then apply compression bandages to.)  So the problem was that my Aunt Flo had come to town, and I wanted to know what the plan of attack was for dealing with that issue for operation time plus six hours...without moving my head or legs.  Turns out the nurse was stumped.  Honestly, how have they not run into that issue before?  The whole thing did not turn out well. It was gory.

Then a doctor with a huge white head on the end of his nose came in to distract me.  I have no idea what he said.  I couldn't stop staring at his massive zit and wondering if it was going to explode while he was leaning over me with my groin exposed.

Finally they wheeled my bed back to the entrance of the cath lab and two doctors, two nurses, and some guy who was presumably there for a purpose stood over me, introduced themselves, and made sure they all knew what they were there for.  This is the part where Andrew was hoping they would all mistakenly think I was scheduled for a breast augmentation.  No dice.  It was confirmed that I was in for a PFO closure.  I told them not to screw it up, and in we went.

To be continued...unless I tire of the subject.